The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and IntersubjectivityHannah Arendt argued that the "political" is best understood as a power relation between private and public realms, and that storytelling is a vital bridge between these realms - a site where individualised passions and shared views are contested and recombined. In his new book, Michael Jackson explores and expands Arendt's ideas through a cross-cultural analysis of storytelling that includes Kuranko stories from Sierra Leone, Aboriginal stories of the stolen generation, stories recounted before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and stories of refugees, renegades, and war veterans. Focusing on the violent and volatile conditions under which stories are and are not told, and exploring the various ways in which narrative reworkings of reality enable people to symbolically alter subject-object relations, Jackson shows how storytelling may restore to the intersubjective fields of self and other, self and state, self and cosmos, the conditions of viable sociality. The book concludes in a reflexive vein, exploring the interface between public discourse and private experience. |
Contents
Acknowledgements | 9 |
The Stories that Shadow Us | 39 |
Reflections on Privacy and Publicity | 65 |
Refugee StoriesRefugee Lives | 87 |
Displacement Suffering and the Critique | 107 |
Preamble | 129 |
Retaliation and Reconciliation | 137 |
From the Tragic to the Comic | 169 |
Other editions - View all
The Politics of Storytelling: Variations on a Theme by Hannah Arendt Michael Jackson Limited preview - 2013 |
Common terms and phrases
Abdulai Aboriginal Anthropology Arthur Kleinman become belong birth Chicago chief child culture death Devereux discourse domains dreams emotions ethnographic existential experience father feel friends Gbeyekan Ghassan Hage Hannah Arendt Heracles hero human identity images imagination implies individual intersubjective Jackson Joe Pawelka Joe's Kenya Kenya Fina Keti Ferenke killed Kleinman Kondembaia Kuranko lifeworlds lives London Malkki Mande Maori Mary McCarthy means memory Mogho Naba mother Muslim myths nation never Nyale object observed one's oneself ourselves political private and public public realms reality recognised refugees relationship sense shame shared Sierra Leone social society Sogolon space speak stories storytelling strategies suffering Sundiata symbolic Ted Hughes tell things thinking thought told Trans transformations trauma truth understanding University Press Veena Veena Das village violence Walter Benjamin Warlpiri Western Apache wife woman women Yata narrative Yeneba Zealand